Tributes paid to Labour"s Tony Benn

14 March 2014
Last updated at 17:40

BBC political correspondent Iain Watson looks back at Tony Benn’s life

Ed Miliband has led tributes to former Labour cabinet minister and veteran left-wing campaigner Tony Benn, calling him an “iconic figure of our age”.

Mr Benn, who has died aged 88, was an MP for more than 50 years and served in the cabinet throughout the 1970s.

Mr Miliband said he would be remembered as a “champion of the powerless”.

But former Chancellor Denis Healey said the far-left views of his rival for the deputy leadership in 1981 had been “very damaging” for the Labour Party.

A major figure on the left of the party, Mr Benn was a popular public speaker, anti-war campaigner and political diarist.

The Labour leader said Mr Benn, whose son Hilary is a member of Mr Miliband’s shadow cabinet, was a great parliamentarian and a conviction politician.

“Tony Benn spoke his mind and spoke up for his values. Whether you agreed with him or disagreed with him, everyone knew where he stood and what he stood for.”

‘Tragedy’

Aged just 25 when he first entered Parliament, Mr Benn subsequently renounced his peerage, which he inherited on his father’s death, to remain in the House of Commons.

He became secretary of state for industry in 1974 under Harold Wilson and went on to become secretary of state for energy, keeping his post when James Callaghan became prime minister in 1976.

But after the Labour government was ousted in 1979, he staged a bitterly divisive battle as the champion of the left with Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party.

Speaking exclusively to Channel 4 News, Tony Benn recorded a message to be played after his death

Prime Minister David Cameron, and his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, were among those who paid tribute to Mr Benn’s campaigning zeal, radicalism and humour.

But Lord Healey said Mr Benn had been “very difficult to work with”.

The peer told the BBC: “He was the hero of the left wing in his early years, but of course that type of left-wing Labour Party didn’t appeal to the public at all, so he was very damaging to the party.”

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Tony Benn’s key dates

1925 Born Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn in London

1943 Serves in the Royal Air Force

1947 Elected President of the Oxford Union

1950 Wins by-election as Labour candidate for Bristol South at 25

1960 Becomes peer on death of his father, which prevents him sitting in House of Commons

1963 Becomes first peer to renounce his title. Re-elected in Bristol South East by-election

1967 Promoted to front bench as minister of technology

1981 Loses Labour Party deputy leadership election to Denis Healey

1983 Benn’s seat abolished by boundary changes.

1984 Wins by-election for Chesterfield

1988 Loses Labour Party leadership election against Neil Kinnock

2001 Does not stand in general election. Becomes president of the Stop the War coalition

2008 Publishes latest version of his diaries 2001-07

Source: BBC History

• Watch 10 key moments from Tony Benn’s life

His “real legacy” was the supersonic Concorde passenger plane, Lord Healey argued, which turned out to be “a great waste of money”.

But former London mayor and ex-Labour MP Ken Livingstone said Mr Benn had been “demonised relentlessly” during his career and was not to blame for Labour’s 1980s turmoil.

“A chunk of Labour right-wingers defected and that split the Labour vote,” he said.

“They were actually broadly lining up behind the Thatcher strategy, as eventually Tony Blair did.

“But here we are: as in America, that Thatcher-Reagan neo-liberal agenda has failed us terribly, and destroyed millions of lives.

“Tony Benn had an alternative. The tragedy for Britain is that he never got to be prime minister and put that alternative into effect.”

Former Labour minister and Lib Dem peer Baroness Williams said that, despite his passionately-held views, Mr Benn “didn’t let himself turn into a sour partisan like a lot of politics today”.

She told the BBC’s Daily Politics programme: “If he disagreed, he would lay out his reasons for disagreement.”

‘Genuine radical’

Respect MP George Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party, told the BBC that Mr Benn was a “really quite majestic figure” who had inspired millions of people.

“The point that’s being made over and over again is that most people disagreed with Mr Benn but they admired him, and so on.

“But actually on the issues that he stood for, most people agreed with him, then and now, from his attempts to bring oil into public ownership in 1974 as the energy secretary right through to the war on Iraq and attitudes to nuclear weapons and the European Union.”

Mr Benn retired from Parliament in 2001, famously saying he wanted to “spend more time on politics”. A prolific writer, the last of his nine volumes of diaries was published in October.

Ken Livingstone: “I never saw Tony Benn lose his temper or get angry”

Joe Haines, who was chief press secretary to Wilson in the 1970s, said: “He did one great thing in his life: he changed the constitution of the House of Lords.

“Apart from that, he symbolised the sort of left-wing nuttiness that nearly destroyed the Labour Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

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Served

50

years as an MP

Published

9

diary volumes

• 
  

  Aged 25 when he became an MP

  
  


• 
  

  Renounced his peerage in 1963

  
  


• 
  

  Served in 4 ministerial roles

  
  

Steve Richards, political columnist for the Independent newspaper, told the BBC that Mr Benn was the most memorable orator in British politics.

“Some of his ideas around democracy and accountability are very fashionable now, and indeed not just in the Labour Party but in the Conservative Party too.”

BBC Parliament will broadcast an evening of programmes in memory of Mr Benn from 19:15 GMT on Friday.

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Tributes paid to Labour"s Tony Benn

What Tributes to Bayard Rustin Leave Out

When Bayard Rustin, the often-unsung hero of the civil rights movement, died in 1987, obituaries either evaded the fact that he was openly gay or danced around it—like the New York Times, which mentioned Rustin’s homosexuality but described longtime partner Walter Naegle as his “administrative assistant and adopted son.” Today, such obfuscation looks both laughable and sad. As the nation marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, media tributes that credit Rustin’s role in that event have often focused on his identity as a black civil rights leader who was also a gay man. Yet in an ironic twist, many of these commemorations have been just as evasive, if not outright dishonest, about another key aspect of Rustin’s life: the fact that in his post-1963 career, he held many views that were anathema to the left, then and now.

The standard media narrative on Rustin is that he was sidelined in the civil rights movement and nearly erased from its history due to homophobia. But this is not entirely accurate—especially not the second part.

It’s true that after a 1953 conviction on a morals charge stemming from a same-sex tryst, Rustin’s compromised situation often kept him out of visible roles in the movement. Shamefully, he was forced out of the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (which he had co-founded) in 1960 after black Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell tried to get leverage over King by threatening to spread rumors that he and Rustin were in a sexual relationship.

Yet, paradoxically, when Sen. Strom Thurmond openly denounced Rustin as (among other things) a homosexual a few weeks before the March on Washington, his attack ended up neutralizing the issue: other black activists rallied around him in solidarity against the segregationist politician. Scholar Arch Puddington, who later worked with Rustin at Freedom House, asserts that after this incident, Rustin’s homosexuality “was never again a serious impediment to his career as civil rights or human rights advocate.” He was a prominent speaker at the march; he and his mentor, union leader A. Philip Randolph, appeared on the cover of Life as its leaders. Six years later, a feature on Rustin in the New York Times Magazine stated that he “came on the intellectual and political scene as the most articulate strategist of the drive for Negro equality.”

Yet the focus of the 1969 Times article—titled, “A Strategist Without a Movement”—was Rustin’s marginalization and alienation from black activism, for reasons completely unrelated to his sexuality (of which the Times, of course, made no mention). Rustin was a committed liberal integrationist in an era of rising black radicalism and nationalism. Younger militants tended to see him as an Uncle Tom—particularly a 1968 controversy in which he backed the United Federation of Teachers in a conflict with black activists in New York over the transfer of several white teachers from a mostly black school district. What’s more, Rustin spoke out against the anti-Semitic rhetoric employed by some of the activists against the union’s mostly Jewish leadership; in a speech to a conference of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, he deplored “young Negroes speaking material directly from ‘Mein Kampf.’”

The other cause of Rustin’s political estrangement from the civil rights movement was his ambivalent stance on the war in Vietnam—another issue that most of the recent tributes have either ignored or fudged. (Thus, a National Public Radio feature noted only that his efforts to bring blacks and whites together to work for economic change were eclipsed by “the dominant issue of the times, the Vietnam War.”)

Thus, in a profile on the Buzzfeed.com website, journalist Steven Thrasher asserts that Rustin supported King in his decision to publicly condemn the war in Vietnam. Yet the truth is far more complicated. Rustin, a devout pacifist with a Quaker background and a World War II draft resister, had initially urged King to oppose the war as early as 1965, and defended his right to do so in 1967. But as historian John D’Emilio notes in the 2003 biography, Lost Prophet, Rustin himself kept his distance from antiwar activism, and “when he did make statements about the building opposition to the war, he tended toward criticism of the movement.”

According to Puddington, Rustin “opposed the war but was deeply disturbed by the prospect of Vietnam’s people coming under the domination of a totalitarian regime on the Soviet or Chinese model.” He came to oppose American withdrawal without a negotiated settlement. He was appalled by antiwar radicals who cheered for a Viet Cong victory, and lambasted the “political naïveté” of well-meaning people who were willing to work with Communists and Maoists in the name of peace.

The tributes to Rustin often describe him as a pacifist. In fact, by 1970, his view of pacifism had changed dramatically. Rustin bluntly stated, “Whereas I used to believe that pacifism had a political value, I no longer believe that.” He still considered himself a pacifist insofar as he had a strong interest in non-military means to defend freedom, which he now regarded as the most important value; without such feasible alternatives, he argued, it was “ridiculous…to talk only about peace.”

Rustin further alienated the left with his passionate support for Israel. He framed the issue in stark terms: “Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel’s existence.” He criticized fellow civil rights leaders Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson for their contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he described as “an organization committed to racism, terrorism, and authoritarianism.” In observations that remain highly relevant, he called Israel “the opiate of the Arabs” and accused “proto-fascist” Middle Eastern regimes of whipping up Israel-hatred to divert attention from their own failure to “liberate their people from poverty and misery.”

Rustin’s pro-Israel advocacy was part of his more general turn to international issues, including human rights activism on behalf of refugees from tyrannical regimes. He became executive chairman of Freedom House, a non-governmental organization that criticized both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships but had a strong anti-Communist bent. His views on post-colonial African politics were no less controversial than his views on the Mideast. He lamented that black majority rule usually turned out to be “a dictatorship by a small black elite over a destitute black population”; although he had campaigned for Jimmy Carter in 1976, he castigated the Carter Administration for its blindness to the dangers of Soviet expansionism in Africa. He defended the 1979 election in Zimbabwe, widely denounced as an attempt to preserve white minority power, and presciently warned that pushing for speedy radical change would result in disaster.

It’s pointless to debate whether Rustin could be called a “neoconservative” in today’s terms. He never wavered in his strong commitment to social democratic governance, including limited redistribution of wealth; yet it is interesting that, as Washington Post blogger Dylan Matthews points out, “neoconservative” was first made up as a term of abuse for members of the “liberal hawk” group Social Democrats USA, of which Rustin was the founding co-chairman. He was also a regular contributor to Commentary, the magazine most strongly associated with neoconservatism.

Labels aside, Bayard Rustin was a great American and a true hero. He had firsthand experience of oppression and prejudice; yet for him, human rights activism was never about solidarity with his own group but about freedom, justice and dignity for all. He had firsthand experience of the shortcomings of Western democracy—yet he understood that it was the bulwark of the values he believed in, and that it’s worth fighting for. His legacy presents a challenge to both left and right: to the right, a warning against demonizing social democratic politics and gay advocacy (which Rustin embraced late in life, less as a personal cause than as an integral part of the human rights struggle); to the left, a warning against treating the West and its allies as the cause of all ills. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

What Tributes to Bayard Rustin Leave Out

What Tributes to Bayard Rustin Leave Out

When Bayard Rustin, the often-unsung hero of the civil rights movement, died in 1987, obituaries either evaded the fact that he was openly gay or danced around it—like the New York Times, which mentioned Rustin’s homosexuality but described longtime partner Walter Naegle as his “administrative assistant and adopted son.” Today, such obfuscation looks both laughable and sad. As the nation marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, media tributes that credit Rustin’s role in that event have often focused on his identity as a black civil rights leader who was also a gay man. Yet in an ironic twist, many of these commemorations have been just as evasive, if not outright dishonest, about another key aspect of Rustin’s life: the fact that in his post-1963 career, he held many views that were anathema to the left, then and now.

The standard media narrative on Rustin is that he was sidelined in the civil rights movement and nearly erased from its history due to homophobia. But this is not entirely accurate—especially not the second part.

It’s true that after a 1953 conviction on a morals charge stemming from a same-sex tryst, Rustin’s compromised situation often kept him out of visible roles in the movement. Shamefully, he was forced out of the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition (which he had co-founded) in 1960 after black Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell tried to get leverage over King by threatening to spread rumors that he and Rustin were in a sexual relationship.

Yet, paradoxically, when Sen. Strom Thurmond openly denounced Rustin as (among other things) a homosexual a few weeks before the March on Washington, his attack ended up neutralizing the issue: other black activists rallied around him in solidarity against the segregationist politician. Scholar Arch Puddington, who later worked with Rustin at Freedom House, asserts that after this incident, Rustin’s homosexuality “was never again a serious impediment to his career as civil rights or human rights advocate.” He was a prominent speaker at the march; he and his mentor, union leader A. Philip Randolph, appeared on the cover of Life as its leaders. Six years later, a feature on Rustin in the New York Times Magazine stated that he “came on the intellectual and political scene as the most articulate strategist of the drive for Negro equality.”

Yet the focus of the 1969 Times article—titled, “A Strategist Without a Movement”—was Rustin’s marginalization and alienation from black activism, for reasons completely unrelated to his sexuality (of which the Times, of course, made no mention). Rustin was a committed liberal integrationist in an era of rising black radicalism and nationalism. Younger militants tended to see him as an Uncle Tom—particularly a 1968 controversy in which he backed the United Federation of Teachers in a conflict with black activists in New York over the transfer of several white teachers from a mostly black school district. What’s more, Rustin spoke out against the anti-Semitic rhetoric employed by some of the activists against the union’s mostly Jewish leadership; in a speech to a conference of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League, he deplored “young Negroes speaking material directly from ‘Mein Kampf.’”

The other cause of Rustin’s political estrangement from the civil rights movement was his ambivalent stance on the war in Vietnam—another issue that most of the recent tributes have either ignored or fudged. (Thus, a National Public Radio feature noted only that his efforts to bring blacks and whites together to work for economic change were eclipsed by “the dominant issue of the times, the Vietnam War.”)

Thus, in a profile on the Buzzfeed.com website, journalist Steven Thrasher asserts that Rustin supported King in his decision to publicly condemn the war in Vietnam. Yet the truth is far more complicated. Rustin, a devout pacifist with a Quaker background and a World War II draft resister, had initially urged King to oppose the war as early as 1965, and defended his right to do so in 1967. But as historian John D’Emilio notes in the 2003 biography, Lost Prophet, Rustin himself kept his distance from antiwar activism, and “when he did make statements about the building opposition to the war, he tended toward criticism of the movement.”

According to Puddington, Rustin “opposed the war but was deeply disturbed by the prospect of Vietnam’s people coming under the domination of a totalitarian regime on the Soviet or Chinese model.” He came to oppose American withdrawal without a negotiated settlement. He was appalled by antiwar radicals who cheered for a Viet Cong victory, and lambasted the “political naïveté” of well-meaning people who were willing to work with Communists and Maoists in the name of peace.

The tributes to Rustin often describe him as a pacifist. In fact, by 1970, his view of pacifism had changed dramatically. Rustin bluntly stated, “Whereas I used to believe that pacifism had a political value, I no longer believe that.” He still considered himself a pacifist insofar as he had a strong interest in non-military means to defend freedom, which he now regarded as the most important value; without such feasible alternatives, he argued, it was “ridiculous…to talk only about peace.”

Rustin further alienated the left with his passionate support for Israel. He framed the issue in stark terms: “Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel’s existence.” He criticized fellow civil rights leaders Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson for their contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he described as “an organization committed to racism, terrorism, and authoritarianism.” In observations that remain highly relevant, he called Israel “the opiate of the Arabs” and accused “proto-fascist” Middle Eastern regimes of whipping up Israel-hatred to divert attention from their own failure to “liberate their people from poverty and misery.”

Rustin’s pro-Israel advocacy was part of his more general turn to international issues, including human rights activism on behalf of refugees from tyrannical regimes. He became executive chairman of Freedom House, a non-governmental organization that criticized both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships but had a strong anti-Communist bent. His views on post-colonial African politics were no less controversial than his views on the Mideast. He lamented that black majority rule usually turned out to be “a dictatorship by a small black elite over a destitute black population”; although he had campaigned for Jimmy Carter in 1976, he castigated the Carter Administration for its blindness to the dangers of Soviet expansionism in Africa. He defended the 1979 election in Zimbabwe, widely denounced as an attempt to preserve white minority power, and presciently warned that pushing for speedy radical change would result in disaster.

It’s pointless to debate whether Rustin could be called a “neoconservative” in today’s terms. He never wavered in his strong commitment to social democratic governance, including limited redistribution of wealth; yet it is interesting that, as Washington Post blogger Dylan Matthews points out, “neoconservative” was first made up as a term of abuse for members of the “liberal hawk” group Social Democrats USA, of which Rustin was the founding co-chairman. He was also a regular contributor to Commentary, the magazine most strongly associated with neoconservatism.

Labels aside, Bayard Rustin was a great American and a true hero. He had firsthand experience of oppression and prejudice; yet for him, human rights activism was never about solidarity with his own group but about freedom, justice and dignity for all. He had firsthand experience of the shortcomings of Western democracy—yet he understood that it was the bulwark of the values he believed in, and that it’s worth fighting for. His legacy presents a challenge to both left and right: to the right, a warning against demonizing social democratic politics and gay advocacy (which Rustin embraced late in life, less as a personal cause than as an integral part of the human rights struggle); to the left, a warning against treating the West and its allies as the cause of all ills. 

RealClearPolitics – Articles

What Tributes to Bayard Rustin Leave Out